13th May 2024, Josh Bradley, Creative Loafing
“It quickly became very clear that Sting knew what he was doing when he first hit up an orchestra all those years ago. The Florida Orchestra gave the songs a fuller, new life. And not in the manner of washed-up, B-list singers and bands re-recording the oldies for […]
11th May 2024, Gabrielle Calise, Tampa Bay Times
“Sting and members of his touring band sat onstage with the Florida Orchestra, playing special arrangements of his lush pop and rock tracks. Before just about every song, Englishman #1 (Sting) walked the crowd through his lyrics, offering behind-the-scenes commentary on his characters. Then Englishman #2 (musical […]
18th March 2024, Gabor Halasz, Die Rheinpfalz
“You’re allowed to rave, because this time it’s time to report on an evening in which everything was just right: the interaction, the communication between the orchestra and the brilliant soloist, the always perfectly balanced sound conditions, the superior and prudent baton management of the conductor The apparatus […]
18th April 2024, Uwe Rauschelbach, Mannheimer Morgen
“Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto and his Fifth Symphony in one evening – as a concert-goer you are a little intimidated and feel the need for less opulence after the break at the latest. And yet, after the concert with the German State Philharmonic of Rhineland-Palatinate, you go home […]
14th January 2024, Alois Ecker, Die Rheinpfalz
“The German State Philharmonic of Rhineland-Palatinate, with a gigantic symphonic line-up, unpacked a program under the title “Unendliche Weiten” with which they had already caused a sensation in the Speyer Technology Museum last summer. Under its chief conductor Michael Francis, who acted with energetic body language and precise […]
Jan Benedict Tiggeler, Mannheimer Morgan, 3rd January 2024
“The German State Philharmonic of Rhineland-Palatinate under its chief conductor Michael Francis invited people to the New Year’s Concert – a successful home game between Vienna and Paris!…
The first Carmen Suite began the evening. Michael Francis, expressive and with precise signaling, spanned the arc from the threatening […]
29th December 2023, Garrett Harris, San Diego Reader
“If there was just one concert in 2023 that I wished everyone could have experienced it would have been Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9. This was the concluding concert of the 2023 Mainly Mozart Festival. The concert was held at the Epstein Family Amphitheater on the campus of […]
Uwe Rauschelbach, Schwetzingen Zeitung, 4th July 2023
“Beethoven’s “Great Fugue” is already a renunciation of the familiar and the conventional. Music that is out of the ordinary. Who wants to go somewhere, but has no orientation or goal. Even the fugue pattern doesn’t hold up and is bursting at the seams. Under their chief conductor […]
Karl Georg Berg, Die Rheinpfalz, 3rd July 2023
“With his coherent and exciting rendition of Mozart’s Requiem, Michael Francis made a deeply moving musical impression…Above all, however, the chorus followed the impassioned expression of Michael Francis, who combined clarity of form with a highly expressive interpretation of the funeral mass…
Last but not least, the concert […]
Uwe Rauschelbach, Schwetzingen Zeitung, 30th June 2023
“In captivating passages [of Shubert’s Symphony No. 9 “Great”], the woodwinds made their mark with striking entries – especially in the lyrical oboe motif in the second movement, which the clarinet carried along – and the brass unfolded its majestically radiant dominance in the intensifications staged by the […]
